Nearing the end of book three of my trilogy, I have a couple
of quandries. One is around the motivation of why a central character takes the
action they do. The action is set – either motivation upholds it – but the
reasoning behind it isn’t. One establishes a character who is focused and makes
a decision, one someone who is closer to their emotional reasoning than their
optimisation.
My other quandry is a straightforward one – have I built
enough to explain why a character (another one, behave characters!) acts the
way they do. Or, have I built too much? (I do have a nasty habit of
sledgehammering information, when my reader might quite like to join the dots
themselves.)
In both cases, I’m not in a tizzy this time – I have been
other times. Why not? Well, it’s fairly straightforward. I have an editor who
will come at this manuscript with fresh eyes. At no point in the editorial
partnership has Teresa asked what happens at the end of the trilogy. When I
wrote book one and she questioned the ending (as others have done since), the
temptation was for me to explain what it built and why. Gently, it wasn’t
encouraged and now – I think – I understand why.
Someone has to see if the darned thing works in the wild.
Someone has to read it with fresh, and critical eyes, and decide if I’ve left
questions where there shouldn’t be any. That person cannot be me.
I am too close. I know too much about what the story is. I
have a clear point in mind that I’m trying to get to. I can’t, frankly, see the
wood for the trees. That isn’t to say I’m a bad self-editor. With a bit of time
and space, I’m not. I can pick up a clunky sentence, or a repeated word
(mostly, the odd one gets through – but see later). I can even see when a
character doesn’t join their thinking together, or the little continuity things
that get past up during that first whizz of writing. What I can never do is see
it with fresh eyes.
One thing that changed when I became published is that
editorial relationship. Abendau is my world, yes, the words are mine. I typed
them all. But, it’s more than just my world. Teresa’s name is in the acknowledgements
as the editor, and listed on Amazon. Her name is on that book just as surely as
mine is and, when people check out an editor’s credentials, they will look at
what that editor has worked on. Suddenly, instead of it being an exercise in
advice – as my first, developmental, edit was – it’s a professional
relationship.
Since Teresa trusts me enough to allow things to stand if I
say, hand on heart, ‘this is going somewhere’, so I must trust her back. If she
tells me my characters need more gravitas in their speech, gravitas they get. If
she tells me a theme springs out of nowhere I don’t go ‘but, but, but… I built
that in chapter three’ – I accept I didn’t build it well enough.
Which is why I’m not stressing so much on this book. If I’ve
got it heinously wrong, I’ll be advised so and given the chance to fix it. If I
have something I’m not quite sure of I can wait for it to bounce back to me and
then check.
It even extends to punctuation. Now, I try to hand in a
reasonably clean manuscript – I like my copy editor, Sam Primeau, and would like
to remain on good terms – but no one can hand in perfection. Sometimes I will
look at a sentence and wonder if I have it just right. Now, instead of
obsessing about it and fixing it ten times, I’ll leave it. If I’m very on the
fence, I might even leave a little comment in the final manuscript. But,
essentially, it’s not my call (or it is, since I do the tedious job of
reviewing changes and deciding whether to accept them or not, but since 99/100
get the okay, it’s mostly Sam’s decision.)
That teamwork has built over the trilogy as we start to know
each other’s strengths. I know, quite quickly now, what Teresa wants – and I
think she knows that I can generally revise things without too much guidance. It’s
been a real pleasure, so much so that I’m actually looking forwards to handing
the manuscript in and seeing what will need done to shape it into the book that
will, come the autumn, hit the shelves.
More about the Abendau trilogy can be found via Jo’s Amazon
page:
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